Remind me, who are the fascists?

Someone's got their hands on a year old members' list for the British National Party and published it on the internet.

Not just a list of their professions or their locations, but actual names and addresses. Their leader rightly fingered the Labour establishment as seeking to intimidate his members.

This is not the first time that members of this legitimate political party have been targetted by the establishment. I blogged before about how morons interrupted a ballet because the ballerina was a BNP supporter to call her a racist, even though she was dating a Cuban-Chinese dancer at the time.

At the opposite end of the political spectrum, members of Sinn Fein will find these tactics of intimidation to be familiar. Until they were brought into the mainstream (when the British and Irish authorities realised they could no longer be criminalised or ignored) they experienced similar tactics.

Again it is incumbent on me to point out a few things that ought to be obvious:

• If the establishment considers the BNP to be an illegal organisation, they should seek to ban them. They've banned quasi-political organisations in Northern Ireland in the past.
• The BNP is not the bootboy skinhead Nazi movement the Guardian would have you believe. It is a small nationalist party that opposes mass immigration. Parties with similar policies and indeed that espouse much more extreme right policies are permitted elsewhere without persecution and garner significant votes in places like France and Austria.
• I'm not British and I don't support BNP politics in any way. But I fervently believe in freedom of speech, the right to congregate without intimidation, democracy and diversity of opinion.

This ongoing targetting of the BNP reminds me of the moronic position of some alleged anti-fascist far-left movements. They oppose any platform for those they consider fascists, without appreciating the irony that opposing freedom of speech and diversity of opinion is itself a fascist act.

You don't have to agree with the BNP to be appalled at this sort of intimidation, in the media and online. It's a fundamental attack on modern democracy in a country that claims to have invented it.

The BNP oppose further mass immigration into the UK, and the mainstream parties fear this position, as it is one with growing support in Britain, especially in this economic downturn.

The UK is a diverse population, but many consider it to be rash to continue an open-doors policy of immigration and an asylum system that is systematically abused. They're allowed to think this, whether their analysis is right or wrong. Publishing the names of those who feel this way on the internet is an appalling attempt to silence a legitimate opinion.

As an Irish nationalist, I have my own concerns in relation to a situation which has seen the non-Irish population here grow from almost zero to over 10% in less than a decade. I don't think such a policy is sustainable long-term, especially in the current economic climate.

And I don't think it is beneficial for a country still grappling with post-colonial concerns including ongoing occupation by a foreign power in part of its territory to have its indigenous culture further challenged by the scale of immigration we have seen in recent times.

Among the establishment, that's not a popular opinion, because we exist in a globalised economy and freedom of movement is a cornerstone of that system. And in Ireland as in Britain, a plethora of state-funded organisations have sprung up to proselytise to the public that any opposition to mass immigration is akin to overt racist tendencies.

Which is arrant nonsense.

The establishment in Britain and in Ireland need to realise that people see through these lies. They know through their own attitudes and behaviour that they can be concerned about the effects of an open-door immigration policy without espousing disgusting racist opinions.

And they can see by looking at diverse, multicultural societies like Australia or Canada or the US that plenty of countries have points-based, merit-assessed immigration policies and yet are clearly not racist nations, as Israel is or apartheid-era South Africa once was.

I've said it before and it needs saying again now. The more the establishment seeks to demonise these concerns, the more it throws petrol on the bonfire. People are entitled to their opinions, and are entitled to gather in political movements without the establishment seeking to intimidate them out of existence.

Because even if the BNP disbanded tonight, the opinions their members espouse won't go away overnight. They'll still be there tomorrow, only they'll go underground and get more radicalised.

No one believes that democracy in France or Austria is under threat, just because much more extreme nationalist parties get elected to positions of power. But obviously, a growing BNP takes votes from Labour and the Tories, just as Sinn Fein took votes from Fianna Fail.

It is fascist to deny such people their legitimate right to congregate, to deny them their opinion, and to seek to intimidate them out of organising as a political movement.

And such actions really are the threat to modern democracy in Britain and in Ireland.

Fascism wins Portugal's abortion referendum

Whatever your position on the age-old debate about abortion, and few people are ever agnostic on this issue, the news from Portugal today is not good.

Portugal, like Ireland, does not provide for legal abortion. As part of his election platform, Prime Minister Jose Socrates had vowed to introduce abortion on demand up until the tenth week of pregnancy.

But when he put the issue to the Portuguese people, only 40% of the electorate actually voted. In Portugal a referendum has to be voted on by half of the electorate as well as receive a majority of the vote if it is to pass.

That's the law. So the referendum wasn't passed.

Now this wasn't apathy. This happened because many people who oppose abortion in Portugal stayed away from the polls, realising perhaps that the divisive issue was likely to pan out against their position. And so it has occured, with an estimated 60% of those who voted approving the change in law.

But even though Mr Socrates did not receive the endorsement he sought, he has decided to push on with the plan to introduce legalised abortion anyway.

This effectively makes the whole referendum meaningless. If Socrates, clearly not as smart as his ancient Greek namesake, intended to ignore the laws of the country and the will of the people in this manner, why bother wasting the time and effort of holding a vote in the first place?

In other words, like Bertie Ahern, who kept holding referenda in Ireland on the Nice Treaty until the people voted the way he liked, Mr Socrates prefers to ignore the will of his electorate, the people he is supposed to serve, when their opinions get in the way of what he wants to do.

This is the opposite of democracy. This is Salazar all over again. I hope that Portuguese people, no matter what their opinion on the emotive issue of abortion, will unite to reject the fascist tendencies of their allegedly socialist Prime Minister.

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution

Emma Goldman's famous quotation sprung to mind today when I heard how an English National Ballet dancer's debut was disrupted by some numpties waving placards.

Basically, as I previously wrote, the Guardian newspaper disgracefully published lists of BNP members in their newspaper that they had obtained by infiltrating the party for seven months.

But despite their lengthy undercover investigation, the worst they could find about the BNP was that - shock, horror - many of their members were afraid to lose their jobs just because of their membership of what is accepted in the UK as a legitimate political party, and that they use encryption software to protect their membership lists.

Now, I am no fan of the far right. But nor am I a fan of fascism when it comes from the far left either.

And the scum who protested at Simone Clarke's debut performance are, despite their chin-stroking, anti-racist, lemon-sucking intentions, classic contemporary fascists who want to stifle opinions they disagree with and shout down those whose political outlook differs from their own.

One wonders when any of them last attended a ballet performance or if indeed they are ever likely to again.

And while they interrupted the performance to yell nonsense slogans against racism, the irony that Ms Clarke is herself in a relationship with a Cuban-Chinese dancer was no doubt was lost upon them.

But rent-a-mobs aren't really the issue here. Like the poor, we will always have with us those who consider it a useful pastime to wave placards and protest against allegedly right-wing ballet dancers while their allegedly left-wing government conducts a murderous imperialist occupation of at least three other countries.

The real problem is the continued campaign by the Guardian newspaper to seek to justify and legitimise their witch hunt of BNP members, solely on the basis of their party membership.

Either the Guardian believes that the BNP is a dangerous and seditious body that ought to be banned and should launch a campaign to see it proscribed. But seven months of trying to prove that particular thesis resulted in precisely nothing.

Or they can admit that the BNP is a small anti-immigration party seeking to make in-roads into the centre-right ground being ceded by the Tories.

But if they were to do the latter, they would also be forced to accept that their witch hunt against private BNP members, such as Ms Clarke, is itself a fascist act that is incompatible with democratic reporting.